Nelson expands CIL plant in Tajikistan

London, England-based Nelson Gold (NLG-T) has boosted the capacity of its carbon-in-leach (CIL) plant at the Jilau gold mine in northwestern Tajikistan.

The expansion, which raises annual throughput to 1.7 million tonnes from 780,000 tonnes, was completed on schedule and about US$2 million under budget, the company reports.

The capital cost was to have been financed by cash flow from operations.

However, declining gold prices forced the company to seek out a US$3-million, 3-year-term loan from the World Bank.

The operation comprises two deposits, Jilau and Taror, which have a combined resource of 5.9 million oz. gold.

Nelson operates the Jilau open-pit mine through a 44% interest in Zeravshan Gold, a joint venture with the government of Tajikistan. Production from the Jilau deposit began in the first quarter of 1996. Output in 1997 was 73,666 oz. gold at a cash operation cost of US$229 per oz; gold production for 1998 is expected to rise to 110,000 oz. at US$202 per oz.

At the Taror deposit, 10 km from Jilau, underground mining is scheduled to begin in 1999. By 2000, annual production from the two deposits combined is projected to reach 280,000 oz.

According to Richard Harrison and Roger Chaplin, analysts with T. Hoare & Co., the gold plant currently being used to proces Jilau ore was built by the Soviets in the late 1980s to treat material from Taror. The Soviets’ intention was to produce a gold-rich copper concentrate and transport it by rail to a copper smelter in the Ural region of Russia or to Kazakstan to recover the gold and copper. However, a bulk sample of the Taror material, taken after the underground mine had been developed, showed that the plant could recover about 80% of the contained gold, but the resulting concentrate had too little copper and too much arsenic to be processed at a copper smelter. The Soviets then switched their attention to the Jilau deposit, which has much simpler metallurgy; they had begun mining it and producing gold concentrates at the plant when the breakup of the Soviet Union brought all the operations to a virtual standstill.

The Soviet-built plant consisted of a primary ore crusher, a semi-autogenous grinding mill and two ball mills, followed by a series of flotation cells.

The mills had a capacity of just under 1 million tonnes per year.

The plant was capable of producing a gold-rich concentrate, but could not produce gold in a marketable form, so Nelson Gold built a CIL plant to process gold-rich mill output, via a thickener (bypassing the flotation circuit) to produce dor bars. Since the expansion, the dor bars have been processed by a refinery in Tajikistan.

In late 1997, James Askew was appointed president and CEO of Nelson Gold, replacing Glenn Laing who left to become president of Lytton Minerals.